At the now concluded COP 27 climate forum in Egypt, there arose a pattern to the proceedings that bore something of a resemblance – perhaps much more in tone than in content – to the North/South, rich/poor debate of three decades plus ago. It appeared that the sense of urgency articulated in the stirring presentations on the issue of ‘rich and poor,’ for which the Third World leaders of that era had developed a particular appetite, their failure to ‘move’ rich countries, notwithstanding, was, to some extent, repeating itself in Egypt. Back then, it was a question of vested interest, the matter of rich countries, while willing to accommodate the hype and hoopla that characterized the appeals of the Third World statespersons, coming to the table with decidedly closed minds on the matter of changing the status quo.
This time around, the paradigm is different. It is not so much a question of rich and poor being in different ‘corners’ insofar as the perils of climate change are concerned; rather, it is a matter of the rich, the north that is, evincing no real preparedness, up to this time, to surrender their largely fossil fuel-driven superior development trajectory in order to push back what ‘the science’ tells us is a rate of global warming that will become altogether unsustainable in what is now very much the foreseeable table.
The important contemporary paradigm shift, however, reposes in what, perhaps, is the somewhat greater measure of ‘clout’ which ‘underdeveloped countries’ now enjoy in ‘steering’ the debate on fossil fuel use on account of their belated surge in access to oil and gas which a growing number of them now enjoy.
Reports from COP 27 suggest that part of the ‘motley gathering’ that converged of the forum included ‘objectors’ to the very direction of the climate debate on the grounds that the voice which some countries in the ‘south’ now have, had not been, up until now, been sufficiently heard in the global climate change discourse.
The problem here reposes in the fact that, to a considerable extent, the climate change discourse is still entombed very much in the wider North/South, Rich/Poor paradigm. That is where, to a considerable extent, much of the problem will lie, in the period ahead.
What has become painfully clear – and to a large extent this was ignored at COP 27- is that in the matter of lowering the recovery and use of fossil fuels, poor countries (in Africa and South America, particularly) have now, on account of the role that their own oil and gas resources play in their development, embraced a sort of you-have-to-talk-to-us-now posture in response to the hand-wringing that now appears to be creeping into the wider climate change debate. Frankly, it will take more than a little persuasion on the part of rich countries to stem the flow of the ultra-aggressive fossil fuel pursuits that a number of ‘poor’ countries have now embarked upon, there being no shortage of oil companies in the west that are altogether prepared to continue to do what they are doing.
There are those who will argue, of course, that given what is widely seen as the proclivity of countries in the west for continuing to debate the climate change issue to death, without taking and serious steps to remove oil and gas from the energy mix on which their continued economic growth depends, are making a less than effective case for ‘lecturing’ traditionally poor countries whose own economies now thrive of their ‘oil wealth.’
So that, perhaps, even if the debate on climate change and the envisaged fate of the planet end game remains and issue, the broader paradigm within which the global climate change discourse takes place in the future, will clearly have to be refashioned.
